Porsche soars, Fiat stumbles in annual survey of new-car quality

Last year's renovation of the annual J.D. Power & Associates new-car quality survey shook up the rankings of the closely watched report, with a focus on design flaws over mechanical issues that elevated several automakers and downgraded others. This year's edition once again names Porsche as the most high-quality name — but it shuffles the rest of the industry around, and finds one brand trailing far behind the rest.

Based on 86,000 surveys of customers who bought or leased 2014 model-year cars after they've lived with them for 90 days, the 28th edition of the J.D. Power survey did have a new wrinkle this year: Winter. J.D. Power usually sends out its sureys in Feburary and March, and the company said  this year's rougher-than-expected winter lowered the scores of many brands in the Midwest and Northeast. As it did last year, J.D. Power found a slight increase in average problems reported, which it said was due to new models and new technologies — like Bluetooth and voice controls — which were prone to not working as expected.

As it did last year, Porsche led all automakers with 74 problems reported per 100 cars, followed in 2014 by Jaguar at 87, Lexus at 92 and and Hyundai at 94. Many automakers reported large swings in their scores; Hyundai, Kia and Nissan all markedly improved, while brands such as Acura and Infiniti plunged; there was no clear trend distinguishing American, European or Asian brands. The overall average grew by 3 percent to 116.